Gotta give credit to innovation. Say whatever you what about Kanye, dude does not stand still, taking chance after chance after chance. Once again, he's created a sprawling mess of an album that cannot be ignored, full of impossible swerves and strokes.
The first 5 tracks auger an absolute classic, each taking modern electronic stylings, smashing them, dancing on the pieces till neon blood splatters. On Sight and Black Skinhead are whipcrack sharp, and just when you settle in for an assault I am a God throws you a curve, counterpointing doubledown grandstanding with shrieks of existential terror, West's greatest Strong-Weak changup ever. And then New Slaves features one of the prettiest outro sections I've heard, well ever, in hip hop or otherwise.
The problem is in that second half, where West seems to have either run out of ideas, or just gotten bored. The pacing drags, the delivery lies flat, and the samples get overused, or just get used badly: Blood on the Leaves's Fly Like an Eagle sample is a distraction, and Bound 2's Brenda Lee ("uh huh honey") sample is just wildly out of place in a song that's already leaden with front-and-center samples. The whole song is so poorly, jerkily composed its almost brilliant. Almost.
Even the album's "bad" half is still weirdly intriguing in its fearless embrace of going its own way, but that's the difference between a classic and a noteworthy curiosity: can it finish? Does it have a whole album's worth of ideas? My Beautiful Dark Twisted fantasy did, but Yeezus doesn't quite get there, limping across the finish line.
As noteworthy curiosities go, this is more noteworthy than most: there's a generous serving of chancetaking here that can't be missed 4/5
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